Micz Flor
Campsite

on Panel "Open Source Content Management Systems"


Herbert Meyer: The next speaker at this marathon is Micz Flor. Micz Flor speaks for Campsite. Campsite is located in Prague and micz flor also is a writer. Two days ago we wrote on nettime an article called "The digital artisan is dead!". Long life the new product. Is Campsite the new product? That is for me to know and for you to find out. 

Micz Flor: What I'll be presenting first is something that picks up to what the first speaker said which is very much about how you come to develop these things. Saying you have a problem. You can't find a real solution because you don't have the time to search properly or because you don't know how to search probably or because you just don't have this tickling feeling that it might be nice to do something yourself. And then you develop this thing and it works and then you don't know what to do with it and you don't know how to sell it or to have any warrantee for this kind of product especially as you are dealing with content. And that is a very touchy issue about how would you have any guaranty for the content that is basically relaying on your product. And then you just end up kind of saying well actually we would like this to be available. So we release it as open source to start with and then we also decided to release all components that we developed under GNU GPL licence. First thing I want to show you is why we did develop it? ... The mouse is disabled. We rewind another 20 years and we are entering Xerox park and see the first mouse... 
So, this is the mega product and suddenly you need to have some kind of body that represents the product and that is campware.org. 

Campware is something that was initialised by CAMP, the Centre for Advanced Media Prague as already been said is based in Prague. And one of the main objects for us was working in the development area of independent media in East Europe and Asia. As we were developing online solutions, as we were developing some kind of ftp based content shearing solutions we also realised that also web publishing was an issue that firstly a lot of existing work that we came across really relied on some fundamentally training about how to make something bold, how to make a link, how make these things. So there was a main problem for us. Also the second problem was that in terms of working in east Europe you very soon explore things which are not based necessary within kind of defold asci or kind of defoled Latin based character sets. That means we needed to find a solution which would allow contributors to just sit down, open a word editor, write their content and publish it on the webside. So the mean objective for us was we have this kind of user interface which is more thinking about the people who need to use this and realising later on that of course that you start from that point that there are some things then that you have to implement later on. Meaning that in terms of real content management only later on we realised that O.k. how we gone deal with video, how we gone deal with audio and so on. 

So the first phase of developing Campsite was based around a print publication in Prague that is called: Transitions online. And Transitions Online is basically originally was Soros founded print publication that appeared quarterly and was dealing with kind of post communist societies in East Europe and through out the years they were printed they established a real network of contributors in all this different places. And at some point Soros decided to pull the money and said we can't actually have print publication anymore. It needs to be webbased publication only if you want to sustain yourself. And in a way that change from print to online suddenly the people doing it realised well everybody by now in these regions has internet access and to actually migrate from a print to online publication makes sense in terms of having these people contributing there content from where ever they are and actually storing it on the central server and this is basically the fundamental realisation for them is O.k. as soon as we can have an initiative interface everybody can just work from home so to speak and they will actually save us a lot of editorial problems by not having to make print but going online straight away. Also of course in terms of being faster and quicker. The old discussion about why to do online presentations. And the publication today looks like this. This is basically like a life example of the system entirely based on Campside. And rather then showing you slides which I don't have to tell you the truth. I would just give you an example of how to manage your content or how you write articles within Campside. And I just wanted to show you one life example that of course as it has been said already the main issue of having a content management system is trying to distinguish your content from your layout and this is of course also done here. 

Basically you have all this little pieces of text and images in this case but if the mouse would work I would venture to show you a kind of streaming media content which we included into Campside as well. So now while I walk over there we have to possibly reconnect the video beam to my laptop... So the first thing is if you log into Campside what you will see is not the front entrance that we just saw basically the finished publication. That would be the work of a designer to come up with an HTML design. Once you have that you will actually just then need to take the HTML, open the source code and replace lets say your text body with a little tech that is specific to Campside which currently is not xlm compatible to the tech needs, but will be as of the next o.o version. 

If you log into the back entrance, which is what most of the editors would do, you would be seeing in this case a kind of full editor interface which allows me to handle publications, complaints, even users. I can have little profiles for user types. For example I want to make a user that a user is only allowed to change images as a photo editor. And the thing is if I go to user for example I could make an individual adjustment of many user rights. So people would have the rights to deal with publications, delete them, add them or individual issues. This is an issue driven solution. Meaning that I can have for example monthly or weekly or quarterly magazines. You can kind of switch of the possibilities of deleting issues. But you can still add issues and so on. This is going down to handling individual images, templates, subscriptions. There was another important thing to us to have an solution which would allow also a subscription module to be implemented. So I can decide if I want to make my content free or not and I can decide that on an individual article level so to speak. So I can say this is free up to this point for example or this individual article is not free. Then I can check if somebody is logged in probably if not I can charge them money which is not really the philosophy of free software as free beer. But as we are dealing with East European media development there is a big issue about maintaining some sort of income in order to be actually be to effort an independent editorial team, independent from your kind of daily governmental media outlets. 

So the local version I have here is a project that we set up on Campside which is for the Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung. That has been mentioned before. This is a new news portal which will actually been launched on the first of December. The October version here which we had like as a dummy number. It's got full content but it is kind of not been publicised yet. I will show you the actual publication in the preview window. So this is what it will look like. This is also entirely based on Campside. So of course lets try to .... So let me just explain a little bit behind the technicality which is something you can do without illustrating the work flow. But it is something I hoped I didn't need to do...I just explain how we did develop this. It was basically as I said already doing what's been said is WCMS. 

So, it is very much a web based content system. And the idea was that the main objective that we have seen with web publishing tools is that you need to have a certain amount of HTML knowledge or you need to learn something on the side of the editor. And we really did not want to do that. We wanted the people to be able to use the intuition of what they have as a web editor and what you have seen very briefly before I logged out was basically that window which is an embedded Java based editor that is using the open swing clauses which we developed further in order to handle the data base. So the idea was we wanted something that I can go somewhere, put this little Java application onto somebodies laptop or somebodies computer and then I can have a low band end with connectivity connect to a data base idea at the other end. They will read the content from a data base which was of course mostly HTML and that is being displayed on my interface in a way that it is intuitive for me to use it. So I mark something. I press a button to bold it. Or you can actually just mark a word and you can click on external link in order to actually then type in a URL. You can chose in a pull down menu as you will seen hopefully soon, open in a new window, open in a frame set or open where ever. You can even have internal links where you have the chance to for example say that O.k. I mark this word. I want to make an internal link to another article, press internal link, up comes an pop-up window where you chose from your existing article entrees the one that you actually would want to link with. 

Another important issue for us was multi lingual support. So that rather then having things in various languages available you can have an article in a language as you make it and then later on you can say I want to translate this specific article into another language. So, that the templates or the kind of layout then actually check with the data base so see O.k. the current user is in the English module but this is also available in Rumanian for example and then it can display depending on this article kind of as a link in Rumanian language. And the final thing which was important for us was to have this unical based interface. So, the unical based Java editor which I'll show you now because I'm running out of time to show you the entire structure and I also have a slot workshop which is Saturday at 2. The first time we launched this editor that I mentioned which I'm doing now it takes a little bit longer because it needs actually to load the Java application into the working memory...This is basically the editor that I mentioned. This is the way where I can for example mark things like this one. You can bold them. I can change the fonds size into bigger size. I can use this pop-up window to give it some kind of colour and I can save it. And as I save it I'm already feeding it back into the data base. And if I go back to the overview so to speak... It is frozen again. You have seen this what I'm going to do now. 

And I tell you a little bit more about the technology behind the thing because the graphical user interface doesn't give me much luck. I actually forgot to mention something which is that most of the content in terms of images and so on is been feed into a Meyer's skill data base. The whole thing is using Linux, Read Head, Mandrax, Suse is standard installation script at the moment. It is fairly simple out of the box. The thing is that you have two ways of storing files onto the system. One is basically into the database which is interesting if you for example have a specific image for a specific article and later on then if you do a website you can make distinctions to lets say O.k. if there is an image with a number 12, do this, otherwise do this and so on. The other way of dealing with files is as always is the file system where you have the possibility similar to people who know web mail interface where you can upload files by just kind of going to browse on your harddisk, pick up the file, put it up on this system. This is how we currently are dealing with larger media files. So that I would actually move the file onto the server through this interface and then from my text editor I can just make a link to that file and then do not have to put the media file into the data base itself. If it is better to use a file system for files or if it is better to use data base I'm sure it is one of the heated debates that will be leading viciously tonight at 8 o'clock and not so viciously on Saturday in my slot. 

And the final development of what we want to do right now is or what actually is been happening is that this editor that you had the pleasure now to see very little before and I repeat netscape froze my computer not my software. That this editor actually works also as an editor that is just stored locally on your computer. Why would that make a difference? When we developed this of course you work in an office. You have always band with. You have always connectivity. You can always just access your data base, have this thing running. If you want to contribute material from the Ukraine you might relay on a rather brittle connectivity and in the end of a long days work you might realise that you didn't have a successful upload. But there was no way with the server at this stage to actually have a local copy of your file and then have a later upload. So what we currently in the process of rapping up is a possibility to have this editor like your writing editor. It is almost like WordPad we would say. And this editor then would allow you to be just the thing that you are using in order to make content. And then at some point you do not press the save button, but you press the upload button and then it would be kind of establish a connection, try to log into the data base and exchange a upload of the content that you wrote. And there is some problems with that as people know who works with data base in terms of tracking who is working on what and at what time. But we will have a simple solution for that. Meaning that you can not basically edit an existing version, but you can prepare things on your local computer and then on pressing a button it will deal up and establish a connection. So now I'm not scroll much because it is always this scrolling thing... So we gone edit "Hip Hop aus dem Plattenbau" and if I'm not entering through this side which is the reader but entering through the backside I will have to of course find my article which ...here it is. Then inside the article I can have various obtions up here already. I need to scroll a little bit keeping it down. I can for example have different check boxes: I want to show this on the front page, I want to show this on the section page and then I can have a very, very simple HTML embedded listing which is Campside saying that list article is on front page and then will basically only pull the content of what I want to show into the HTML design. So here if I now start this again. I can load the text in here. And what I did earlier I can bold it. I can give it some colour and so on and if I press this button I'll be uploading it onto the data base and I should have the change to see the results right here. It worked. And the same thing here with building external links as I demonstrated earlier. You can just type them in. You can then say do I want this to be a new window, the full window or a frame with a specific name. In our case lets say we want to make a new window. I save it and it will actually come up as a link which if I click on it will open a new window. I'm off-line so I can actually show you this side either. The other thing is that as I said images can be uploaded here. if I click on images you can see that I already have quite a few images available. For example this one. So I can embed images into my article as well. This is the last thing I put the image in there. I just basically click on image. I will then click onto the image. This is not what you see is what you get. It is near what you see is what you get. And make the "Minisonne". I align it to the left. I give it what ever alternative text. I save it and for reload it will then include it into then into that data base entry here. it is not properly layout but this is how it works. 

We currently do as I said the Fluter.de which is the news portal from the Bundeszentrale. we also are working on a publication that is currently in the foyer: Matter mute as the website of the mute magazine which I guess anybody who takes themselves or herself seriously should possibly subscribe over the next 48 houres I should think. And other then that we have currently four people more or less full time developing this and we hope that we will find some kind of additional NGO funding in order to maintain it. And in order to also increase the usebility of this interface which is to us at the moment the main user sented approach we are going for. 

[transcript: Katja Pratschke]